Modern hospitals treat and discharge hundreds of patients every day, requiring frequent transportation of patients, equipment, and other items between points in the hospital. Every minute of time lost because of insufficient workflow significantly impacts the hospital's performance and the patient's health.
Traditional hospital management is time consuming, prone to error, and significantly underutilizes the capabilities of each department. Different hospital units and departments often lack sufficient communication systems. Traditional techniques involve telephone-based manual reporting of an event and/or manual requests for transport, usually through phone calls between individuals in the facility. For example, in traditional systems, a requester may place a telephone call to a phone number, and request a transport service or provide information about a transport status. The requester may interact with a computerized interactive voice response (IVR) system, which then processes the received information for review by a dispatcher to identify and direct a transporter in response to the request or event, or manually queue the request to be assigned automatically. Current systems rely solely on information received during a manual telephone call, which can be sporadic and/or untimely, and can include incorrect information. Moreover, because traditional systems rely on telephone calls and IVR-based processing, traditional systems often experience very high call volumes which strain communication networks in the facility. In many instances, unnecessary and redundant calls also increase network strain, and traditional systems usually result in overloaded telephone lines and missed requests, thereby degrading the quality and speed of transport of patients and equipment.
In view of the technical deficiencies of current systems discussed above, there is a need for improved systems and methods centralized real-time event detection and communication.